Lugar de bactérias é o laboratório. .. // USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/2015/05/28/biolabs-pathogens-location-incidents/26587505/
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 High-profile lab accidents last year with anthrax, Ebola and bird flu at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the discovery of forgotten vials of deadly smallpox virus at the National Institutes of Health raised widespread concerns about lab safety and security nationwide and whether current oversight is adequate to protect workers and the public. Wednesday the Department of Defense disclosed one of its labs in Utah mistakenly sent samples of live anthrax -- instead of killed specimens – to labs across the USA plus a military base in South Korea where 22 people are now being treated with antibiotics because of their potential exposure to the bioterror pathogen. As many as 18 labs in nine states received the samples, the CDC said Thursday.

"What the CDC incidents showed us ... is that the very best labs are not perfectly safe," says Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University professor of epidemiology. "If it can happen there, it certainly can happen anywhere."

USA TODAY

10 incidents discovered at the nation's biolabs

Some people find little reassurance that nobody was sickened in the CDC accidents or in the historically low numbers of serious infections among lab workers generally, or that infections spreading into communities surrounding labs have been rarer still.

"Many of us think that's really a matter of good fortune," said Beth Willis, who chairs a citizen lab advisory panel in Frederick, Md., home to one of the nation's largest high-containment research campuses at the Army's Fort Detrick.

“You're talking about something that has the ability to take off and we could not be confident of being able to contain it.”

DAVID RELMAN, MICROBIOLOGY PROFESSOR AT STANFORD

The country's best labs have robust safety programs, said Kenneth Berns, co-chair of a panel of outside lab safety advisers currently examining biosafety at CDC and other federal labs. Yet the systemic safety problems identified at the CDC's prestigious labs have raised questions about what's happening elsewhere. "It's a matter of some concern," said Berns, a distinguished professor emeritus of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Florida.

The consequences could be devastating if accidents were to occur with lab-created strains of deadly influenza viruses that are purposely engineered to be easier to spread than what's found in nature, said David Relman, a microbiology professor at Stanford Universitywho is a federal adviser on lab safety and a past president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

"You're talking about something that has the ability to take off, and we could not be confident of being able to contain it," he said.

Relman said that not enough is known about the state of safety at labs that perform infectious disease research but emphasized that the kinds of labs drawing concern are the same ones the public needs to discover important new treatments and vaccines. "We have to find some happy blend of minimized risk and enhanced benefit," he said.